


A richer dust concealed.

by je_t_oublie



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Funerals, Kelas POV, M/M, Poetry, Post Canon Cardassia, Post-Book: Enigma Tales (Star Trek), one sided Elim Garak/Julian Bashir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 09:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17764352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/je_t_oublie/pseuds/je_t_oublie
Summary: Then, one unassuming day, between one breath and the next, all that still remained of Doctor Julian Bashir had slipped away.





	A richer dust concealed.

2386

The freshly turned bed of soil was rare in Cardassia city, eleven years after the Fire and healed enough that manual agriculture was no longer a necessity. Soil reclamation projects were for the borders, liminal spaces between city and desert. She had been shaped by her inhabitants for hardy plants amongst rocks rather than the pointed leaves and delicate petals cradled in his friend’s hands. These flowers were not the first delicate things the hands had cradled today, but they did not tremble in the dirt as they had around the slack and cold fingers. They were cool, a steadiness of work roughened palms that Kelas had clung to as a rare certainty when he couldn’t bear fracturing eyes. 

He had been selfish before, the possibility a constant was going to shake too much and he had recommended the medical staff to Elim, doctors who would pass the stringent security checks, who hadn’t spent years in a labour camp, who were more specialised to these kinds of problems newly acknowledged in this new world birthed by fire. Doctors who hadn’t watched their ex-lover write ten years of unsent love letters to the patient. Doctor who hadn’t spent ten years watching their lover sending letters to the patient which had danced gracefully around mentioning a love only one of them still clung to with each cell in his myocardium tissue. 

The oath he had once sworn as a doctor had changed, the fledging post-Fire Cardassia struggling for change, reaching for examples of morality over tradition even if they did not have the skills to enforce them yet, or even to formally train those with the new code even as buildings still toppled around their neckridges. Do no harm. That’s why he had looked only at Elim’s hands as he explained he was needed somewhere else and could not stand beside him to meet what was left of Julian Bashir. Not that he had already been there to put together the pieces of Bashir's first visit and abrupt exit, warned by their private comms to stay at their private Paldar residence, and then later, off-duty hospital staff clustered around the newscasts of smoke pouring out of the castallen's residence while Kelas typed and deleted a dozen comms to check on his friend’s health without being a distraction. 

He had visited only once, after the.. installation, to take measure of the man Elim had spoken of as both fatally magnetic and terminally infuriating in equal measures. Breathtakingly compassionate and stubborn far past the point of idiocy. But there was none of that in the placid gaze, the only pale reflections of the larger than life character painted in fine lines at the corners of his eyes and the grooves that ran down to his mouth which were concealed in the same grey and brown growth that curled over his forehead. When he had knelt, knees creaking and back aching, trying to search those eyes for what had been stripped away, his hand had fallen on something soft, a scrap of fabric and foam shaped with careful stitching into the likeness of an animal he did not know. That had stopped him from examining the man, instead brushing gentle hands over the toy that so resembled in idea, if not in shape, the playthings Cardassian children had cradled when he was a boy, what they might still cradle now for all he knew. He tucked it back into those lax hands, paused only for a moment longer and left. It wasn’t what Elim had told him, but it was something. 

Then, one unassuming day, between one breath and the next, all that still remained of Doctor Julian Bashir had slipped away and he stood beside his friend, mourning a life lost on behalf of someone else. The tender stalks of green and red stood in concentric circles, and cradled in their protective arms a circle of stone, replicated and meticulously carved with a laser by a man who had lain down his reports of the day and turned his calloused hands to something he deemed more important. They weren’t in a Cardassian script he had recognized, tucked carefully away in a chair as a support while the biobed a floor above, turned off, held the body one final unsent love letter was being written to. But Garak spoke them now, the letters that staggered along under the name in curved and formal Cardassian, surrounded by plants that did not speak of the same world. 

 

2388

The freshly turned bed of soil was rare in Cardassia city, thirteen years after the Fire and healed enough that manual agriculture was no longer a necessity. He knelt in front of it, unsteady hands cradling delicate shoots with fine root systems that reached for the dirt that would sustain them for what short time before he, absentminded when not applied to work or a book, watered them with either too much or too little. They would never become the riot of colours that burst in the bed beside them, but without the tending hand of their gardener, those too would eventually wither and die, leaving only a circular plaque and a poem he doubted anyone left on Cardassia would know. 

Castellan Lang, only one year into her castallenship, exiled and educated for long enough that she knew when it was better to forego tradition, had announced the death of the former castellan and the date of a State funeral in his honour but had left his actual burial in the hands of his previous closest advisor. He had no doubt that Elim would have been amused by the pompous occasion going on around an empty coffin, but no one would be there to mourn his loyalty to those he loved, his wry sense of humour and his appalling taste of literature. The only two people who had the intimacy of that knowledge were instead alone in the garden, following a rite from only two years ago with the same three souls. It would be around now that Lang would be giving a speech about the achievements of the former Castellan, his efforts to support the arts and his help in healing their new Cardassia, and he lay the new plaque among the scattered seedlings, the same circle but with no name picked out in Cardassian script. Instead, in unsteady lines, was a simple representation of the recitation mask that hung behind him on the Paldar home, pillars on either side reflecting those that had been built by the hands that now only held soil.

Time had not stopped when Bashir had died. Political wheels still turned, newscasts still blaring out without rest, first on the Carnis report, then on the new U of U chancellor and oh but Elim’s quiet satisfaction with the changes announced on the very first day had been infectious. Cardassia still required the devotion of her children, the doors of the hospital, the government buildings and the police opened and closed with every breath of the city. Strong of step, Elim walked to the podium and resigned his position in light of his inability to be impartial in the prosecutions of war criminals by Bajor. The newscasts hadn’t been able to give substantial evidence for the Castellan’s reasoning, but the night before the statement Kelas had accompanied him to their home, ostensibly to open windows and uncover furniture for their permanent return, but instead stood at the open window while Elim crouched in the garden, palm and fingers spread over the circular stone, eyes closed. Had Kelas not seen too much to be a religious man, he would have said benediction. 

He had stood at the same window as he watched the incrementally slowing pace of his friend, the head bent ever closer as Elim restitched his already tailored clothing to fit a body which thinned even as Kelas pushed extra replicated desserts on him, and Elim raised sardonic eyeridges at him. The hands that were steady as they tended to flowers but trembled as they batted away medical tricorders they both knew wouldn’t help him. They were hands that had toiled for Cardassia in any multitudes of roles, but in their retirement had lost their purpose. If, as Kelas thought in the darkest hours of sleepless nights, Elim hadn’t already lost his meaning on a quiet day nearly two years before. 

He dusted off his hands and slowly got to his feet, knees creaking and lips pressed together to stifle a groan there was no longer anyone around to hear. Kelas retired to the ramshackle house, a glass of kanar in one hand, a novel in the other, but eyes on the string of stars that made up the prophetic Prime Taluvian. The moons rose to illuminate their impassive likenesses, catching in upraised leaves and petals and reflecting words back into the sky that had found their existence in a world so distant from their own as to not exist to those celestial beings. 

 

“If I should die, think only this of me:  
That there's some corner of a foreign field  
That is forever England. There shall be  
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;   
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the poem Garak inscribes comes from The Soldier by Rupert Brooke, 1914. You can find the full text here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13076/the-soldier
> 
> This story has been, in pieces, in my notebook since November but was very difficult to write. Unhelpfully, I also started watching Voyager and immediately fell in love with Janeway, and then later with Chakotay when he brought up comparative mythology. Specific tastes, mes amis. Therefore now have a dozen story ideas about them as well as about Julian and Garak.


End file.
